The decision by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows follows a ruling earlier this month by the Colorado Supreme Court that booted Trump from the ballot there under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine’s Democratic secretary of state on Thursday removed former President
“However, we are a nation of laws, and therefore until he is actually found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should be allowed on the ballot,” Golden wrote.
The Trump campaign on Tuesday requested that Bellows disqualify herself from the case because she’d previously tweeted that Jan. 6 was an “insurrection” and bemoaned that Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate after the capitol attack. She refused to step aside.
“My decision was based exclusively on the record presented to me at the hearing and was in no way influenced by my political affiliation or personal views about the events of Jan. 6, 2021,” Bellows told the Associated Press Thursday night.
Bellows is a former head of the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. All seven of the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court, which split 4-3 on whether to become the first court in history to declare a presidential candidate ineligible under Section 3, were appointed by Democrats. Two Washington, D.C.-based liberal groups have launched the most serious prior challenges to Trump, in Colorado and a handful of other states.
That’s led Trump to contend the dozens of lawsuits nationwide seeking to remove him from the ballot under Section 3 are a Democratic plot to end his campaign. But some of the most prominent advocates have been conservative legal theorists who argue that the text of the Constitution makes the former president ineligible to run again, just as if he failed to clear the document’s age threshold — 35 years old — for the office.
Likewise, until Bellows’ decision, every top state election official, whether Democrat or Republican, had rejected requests to bar Trump from the ballot, saying they didn’t have the power to remove him unless ordered to do so by a court.
In California, which has the largest trove of delegates in the 2024 presidential contest, Trump was included on the certified list of candidates released Thursday for the state’s March 5 primary.
Secretary of State Shirley Weber faced political pressure to reject Trump’s candidacy in the state, including from Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a fellow Democrat who urged her in a Dec. 20 letter to “explore every legal option” to remove the former president from the California ballot. Weber later responded that she was guided by “the rule of law,” and indicated the proper venue to resolve ballot challenges was in the courts.
The timing on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is unclear, but both sides want it fast. Colorado’s Republican Party appealed the Colorado high court decision on Wednesday, urging an expedited schedule, and Trump is also expected to file an appeal within the week. The petitioners in the Colorado case on Thursday urged the nation’s highest court to adopt an even faster schedule so it could rule before March 5, known as Super Tuesday, when 16 states, including Colorado and Maine, are scheduled to vote in the Republican presidential nominating process.
The high court needs to formally accept the case first, but legal experts consider that a certainty. The Section 3 cases seem tailor-made for the Supreme Court, addressing an area of U.S. governance where there’s scant judicial guidance.
The clause was added in 1868 to keep defeated Confederates from returning to their former positions of power in local and federal government. It prohibits anyone who broke an oath to “support” the Constitution from holding office. The provision was used to bar a wide range of ex-Confederates from positions ranging from local sheriff to Congress, but fell into disuse after an 1872 congressional amnesty for most former Confederates.
Legal historians believe the only time the provision was used in the 20th Century was in 1919, when it was cited to deny a House seat to a socialist who had opposed U.S. involvement in World War I. But since the Jan. 6 attack, it has been revived.
Last year, it was cited by a court to remove a rural New Mexico County Commissioner who had entered the Capitol on Jan. 6. One liberal group tried to remove Republican Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene from the 2022 ballot under the provision, but Cawthorn lost his primary so his case was thrown out, and a judge ruled for Greene.
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